Suchergebnisse

AbstractThe paper investigates the impact of macroeconomic conditions on the profitability of EU banks by testing for differential effects according to the business model. We group banks into three business models using a hierarchical cluster analysis and find that using clusters based on the share of assets invested in loans reveals heterogeneity in the sensitivity of bank profitability to economic growth across business models. Our main result is that GDP growth, credit growth, and the risk‐free yield curve influence profitability as expected, but we also find that the effect of GDP growth is only significant for banks that have a high and medium share of assets invested in loans, and not for banks that hold large portfolios of securities. This difference depends on the impact of growth on asset write downs, especially those on loans and, to a lesser extent, on revenues. The results suggest that studies relating bank profitability to macroeconomic conditions should take the heterogeneity of business models into account.

A nuclear data-based uncertainty propagation methodology is extended to enable propagation of manufacturing/technological data (TD) uncertainties in a burn-up calculation problem, taking into account correlation terms between Boltzmann and Bateman terms. The methodology is applied to reactivity and power distributions in a Material Testing Reactor benchmark. Due to the inherent statistical behavior of manufacturing tolerances, Monte Carlo sampling method is used for determining output perturbations on integral quantities. A global sensitivity analysis (GSA) is performed for each manufacturing parameter and allows identifying and ranking the influential parameters whose tolerances need to be better controlled. We show that the overall impact of some TD uncertainties, such as uranium enrichment, or fuel plate thickness, on the reactivity is negligible because the different core areas induce compensating effects on the global quantity. However, local quantities, such as power distributions, are strongly impacted by TD uncertainty propagations. For isotopic concentrations, no clear trends appear on the results.

In recent years the pressure on public budgets in almost all industrialised countries has lead governments to pursue efficiency in the allocation and management of resources trying to apply to scientific research and higher education some fundamental ideas of the economic analysis such as the concepts of economies of scale and scope. This paper explores scale, scope and trade-off effects in scientific research and education. Advanced productivity methods are used to analyse the Italian system of universities. In particular, robust methods based on the concept of order −m frontiers (Cazals, Florens and Simar, 2002) are really useful in this framework for their properties of not being influenced by extremes and noise in the data. Furthermore, in the field of science and education, external factors and environmental conditions may be cause of heterogeneity and influence dramatically the performance of universities. Hence, we apply the Daraio and Simar (2003) full nonparametric methodology (that overcomes most limitations of previous one or two-stage approaches) to robustly take into account external environmental factors. From a preliminary investigation on Italian data we find that economies of scale and scope are not significant factors in explaining research and education productivity. We do not find any evidence of the trade-off research vs teaching: on the contrary, increasing scientific quality improves educational efficiency; on the other hand, a good educational efficiency does not deteriorate research efficiency. About the trade-off academic publications vs industry oriented research, local effects of a complementarity/rivalry relation seem to emerge: it seems that initially, collaboration with industry may improve productivity, but beyond a certain level the compliance with industry expectations may be too demanding and deteriorate the publication profile. Nevertheless, the existence of an inverted U−shaped relation should be confirmed by more evidence. Advanced robust methods in efficiency analysis are shown as useful tools for measuring and explaining the performance of a public research system of universities. Further developments of the analysis are outlined.

In recent years the pressure on public budgets in almost all industrialised countries has lead governments to pursue efficiency in the allocation and management of resources trying to apply to scientific research and higher education some fundamental ideas of the economic analysis such as the concepts of economies of scale and scope. This paper explores scale, scope and trade-off effects in scientific research and education. Advanced productivity methods are used to analyse the Italian system of universities. In particular, robust methods based on the concept of order −m frontiers (Cazals, Florens and Simar, 2002) are really useful in this framework for their properties of not being influenced by extremes and noise in the data. Furthermore, in the field of science and education, external factors and environmental conditions may be cause of heterogeneity and influence dramatically the performance of universities. Hence, we apply the Daraio and Simar (2003) full nonparametric methodology (that overcomes most limitations of previous one or two-stage approaches) to robustly take into account external environmental factors. From a preliminary investigation on Italian data we find that economies of scale and scope are not significant factors in explaining research and education productivity. We do not find any evidence of the trade-off research vs teaching: on the contrary, increasing scientific quality improves educational efficiency; on the other hand, a good educational efficiency does not deteriorate research efficiency. About the trade-off academic publications vs industry oriented research, local effects of a complementarity/rivalry relation seem to emerge: it seems that initially, collaboration with industry may improve productivity, but beyond a certain level the compliance with industry expectations may be too demanding and deteriorate the publication profile. Nevertheless, the existence of an inverted U−shaped relation should be confirmed by more evidence. Advanced robust methods in efficiency analysis are shown as useful tools for measuring and explaining the performance of a public research system of universities. Further developments of the analysis are outlined.